ABSTRACT
When Milton recounts the persecution of nonconformists under Archbishop Laud in Of Reformation (1641), stating that 'nothing but the wide Ocean, and the savage deserts of America could hide and shelter [them] from the fury of the Bishops' (YP 1: 585), the crossing of the ocean is perceived as a last resort in extremity but otherwise as undesirable as the 'savage deserts of America' in general.1 The ocean, to Milton, is a hostile force, in Paradise Lost ambiguously associated with the chaotic structure of original matter from which God created the world but which in itself is perceived as an almost anti-vital force: 'The secrets of the hoary deep, a dark / Illimitable ocean without bound, / Without dimension, where length, breadth, and highth, / And time and place are lost' (PL 2.891-4).2 The elegy Lycidas (1638), a tribute to Milton's deceased friend Edward King who was drowned in a shipwreck in 1637 not far from the British coast, presents the sea as a destructive force and imagines the 'sounding seas / Wash[ing] far away ... [the] bones' of King, depicting them 'beyond the stormy Hebrides' or 'under the whelming tide ... [at] the bottom of the monstrous world' (154-8).3 And although at the end of Lycidas Milton evokes 'the dear might of him that walked the waves' (173), presenting Christianity as the vanquisher even of the destructive ocean, the darker forces evoked in the poem linger, especially the piece of superstition which claims King's ship, the 'fatal and perfidious bark', to have been 'Built in the eclipse, and rigged with curses dark' (100-101). The life-sustaining power of inland waters, the 'fountain, shade, and rill' of Lycidas (24) or the positively connoted river Severn ('the glassy, cool, translucent wave', 860) out of which arises the nymph Sabrina in Milton's masque Comus to tender salvation to the human protagonists in the form of 'Drops ... from my fountain pure' (911), is in Milton continuously opposed by the open sea with its apparently limitless
expanse and threatening bottom which symbolize chaos and dangerous conflict.
